A Poem for Adam Zagajewski in Early 2021
this book of yours that arrived today
tells me you were born in 1945
(which makes you old enough to be my father)
(which is true (because I think my father was born
around 1945) (I say 'I think' because I don't
know for sure & you can take that for what it means) but
in any case I think I would have liked you) (I already like
you) (by which I mean we would have gotten
along) I like the way your line breaks (your mind
works) the way you (probably) held a glass
of milk ((or wine) (or whisky) (they're all the same you'd
claim)) & quaff ( does anyone quaff anything these days)
that seems like an anachronism (even for a poet)
& it doesn't even bother me when you think
about poems ( even as you write them)
pipe it into rows of S shapes & buns that he'd bake so slowly
they would remain as pale as possible & he'd split the buns in
two & stick the S & the halves of the bun into a ball of whipped
cream & spoon the ball with the pastry stuck into it onto a
sauced filled with sieved raspberry coulis & when the waiters
walked to your table with the saucer held up high & swooped
down to serve you the dessert it was revealed that the flam-
buoyancy of the waiter's gait from the kitchen to the table would
nudge the cream across the plate so that a white swirl would
slice through the red liquid & the people would gasp because
it looked very much like a little swan swimming across a red
pond & maybe that's when I thought about being an artist but
dad left before he could show me how to make the swan trick
work) (so I started reading instead)
(like my friend Dominic said)
genius is all about
how much
you can forgive
(I'm so
rry)
it took me
(so) long
Feature Date
- September 15, 2024
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“A Poem for Adam Zagajewski in Early 2021” from Love Language: by Nasser Hussain.
Published by Coach House Books in September, 2023.
Copyright © 2023 by Nasser Hussain.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Nasser lives in Leeds, UK and teaches Creative Writing at Leeds Beckett University. He has written reviews for the Times Literary Supplement, Poetry London, Ambit, and the Poetry School, and has appeared on BBC’s The Verb and Free Thinking. His constraint-based book SKY WRI TEI NGS, published with Toronto’s Coach House Books in late 2018, is a collection in which every word is an IATA airport code. His second book with Coach House, love language, was released in the Autumn of 2023. He is currently working on a number of new projects, including an extended piece of asemic visual poems about punctuation.
"Think of 'time as a lantern,' suggests Nasser Hussain, in these inimitable poems that take play seriously and allow seriousness to enter the room disguised as incantation. These are poems that long to dismiss the lyric’s most recent pretty mask of polite propriety and instead take us to the lyric’s ancient roots. It started way back, the poet says, 'when a cave person made a grunt,' to speak the name of a thing. Indeed. This is the lyric’s ancient pact with the world: to spin playful language into seriousness of giving things their names—what are we without this speaking, this tune? Hussain knows this and writes beautiful poems—and I, for one, am grateful."
—Ilya Kaminsky
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